Courtesy of Juan Dubra and his students. The article is here.

An essay on Mickey Mouse and the economics of retroactive copyright.

If you have been to the movies lately, you have probably seen the MPAA anti-piracy video. The party line is that piracy hurts the ordinary working employee. Economics shows clearly that Southpark has it right: in fact the ordinary employee has little to fear - it is the highly paid employee who is at risk. For details, click here.

CNET News is reporting that the copy protected album Contraband by Velvet Revolver is topping the U.S. charts - the first DRM protected CD to do so. Bear in mind that this is the copy protection that can be disabled by holding down the shift key on your keyboard while inserting the disk. Has it had a big impact on piracy? I was able to download working MP3 copies of the songs on the album from gnutella in less time than it would take to drive to the store, buy the CD, and drive home. They have, apparently, managed to annoy some Apple customers with the DRM though.

A nice talk given by Cory Doctorow to Microsoft assesses the technology, ethics and economics of digital rights management. This quote summarizes things nicely

No Sony customer woke up one morning and said, "Damn, I wish Sony would devote some expensive engineering effort in order that I may do less with my music."

Brad DeLong seems to have gotten this backwards. There is an important difference between keeping your data on someone else's computer/using someone else's domain, and using open source software. If the person storing your data or controlling your domain disappears - you are in trouble.

Brad seems to think this is a problem with open source software: if the programmer disappears the you are in trouble. But there are two kinds of open source software: software which simply makes the source available, and free software, as in the GNU, BSD or MIT licenses. In the case of free software, anyone, without permission of the owner, can pick up the project. This provides some insurance against the disappearance of the original owner. In the case of software that is nonfree - whether or not it is open source - if rights for further development cannot be negotiated with the original owner, either because he/she is unwilling, or simply can't be found, there is no legal modification of the software that can take place - and then you really are in trouble.

The most widely used open source software - Linux, Apache and Mysql - are free software. The widely used PHP program is (in its current version) open source but not free. Java is neither open source nor free.

One of the goals of the Creative Commons License is to make sure that copyrighted material does not become unavailable or unusable if the owner abandons it; Larry Lessig's proposal to once again require copyright renewal is designed to serve the same purpose. Changes in copyright law that have made copyright automatic and eliminated renewal create an enormous problem with abandoment, because unless the owner makes explicit provisions, abandoned creations become unusable by anyone. Unfortunately, these modifications of the copyright law serve no useful economic purpose - it appears in fact that they are designed to protect large businesses which can cover the fixed cost of finding and negotiating copyrights from competition from small businesses that cannot.

One of the problems with copyrighted software is that if the copyright holder disappears no one can legally take over maintenance of the software - potentially leaving the paying customers with unusable data. One of the competitive advantages that open source software [more precisely free software as in GNU, BSD license] has, particularly for small firms, is that it provides the customer with a guaranteee that they can take over maintenance of the software. The abandonment problem is a real one.

In a different context it is in the news today that a complex series of events resulted in the disappearance of 3000 websites, including in some cases, years of data. Even if the data is eventually returned, they will return to a different web address, meaning that any readership accumulated at the old address will be lost. A similar event took place when CNET purchased mp3.com and dumped years of accumulated music. The bottom line is - for the individual protection of "intellectual property" does not take place through copyright - it takes place by making sure that you keep copies of your own data and that you own your own web addresses.

Why copyright extension is a bad idea, and why economic growth reduces the social benefits of patents

An article in the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank magazine, The Region by Douglas Clement based on Boldrin & Levine's analysis of intellectual property. Reprinted in Reason Online, also see the Slashdot thread on our book and on the Reason article, and the discussion at the Library of Economics and Liberty.

A lawyers view of intellectual property. Including some interesting observations about industries that do not have recourse to intellectual "property."